Overview and CQC Inspections

OverallGood

Our inspector's description of this service

Last updated 14 November 2017
We carried out this inspection under Section 60 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 as part of our regulatory functions. This inspection was planned to check whether the provider is meeting the legal requirements and regulations associated with the Health and Social Care Act 2008, to look at the overall quality of the service, and to provide a rating for the service under the Care Act 2014.

This announced inspection took place on 2 and 3 October 2017. The inspection team consisted of one inspector and an expert by experience. An expert-by-experience is a person who has personal experience of using or caring for someone who uses this type of care service.

As part of the inspection, we reviewed the information we held about the service, including notifications. A notification is information about events that by law the registered persons should tell us about. The provider completed a Provider Information Return (PIR). This is a form that asks the provider to give some key information about the service, what the service does well and improvements they plan to make. We asked for feedback from the commissioners of people's care to find out their views on the quality of the service. We also contacted the Local Authority for information they held about the service. We used this information to help us plan our inspection.

During the inspection, we spoke with nine people who used the service and two relatives. We also spoke with the registered manager, the care manager, a care coordinator and three care staff.

We reviewed a range of records, which included the care records of four people. We looked at four staff files, which included pre-employment checks and training records. We also looked at other records relating to the management of the service including polices and quality audits.

Inspection ratings

We rate most services according to how safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led they are, using four levels:

Outstanding – the service is performing exceptionally well.

Good – the service is performing well and meeting our expectations.

Requires improvement – the service isn't performing as well as it should and we have told the service how it must improve.

Inadequate – the service is performing badly and we've taken enforcement action against the provider of the service.

No rating/under appeal/rating suspended – there are some services which we can’t rate, while some might be under appeal from the provider. Suspended ratings are being reviewed by us and will be published soon.

Ticks and crosses

We don't rate every type of service. For services we haven't rated we use ticks and crosses to show whether we've asked them to take further action or taken enforcement action against them.

There's no need for the service to take further action. If this service has not had a CQC inspection since it registered with us, our judgement may be based on our assessment of declarations and evidence supplied by the service.

The service must make improvements.

At least one standard in this area was not being met when we inspected the service and we have taken enforcement action.